Stephen Harper and the triumph of the corporation state

Frances Russell is a Winnipeg-based freelance journalist and author. She is a regular contributor to the Winnipeg Free Press and is the author of two award-winning books. Her career has spanned nearly 50 years and includes time as a reporter and political columnist with the Winnipeg Free Press, the Vancouver Sun, the Globe and Mail and United Press International, in Ottawa. She also provided occasional columns and commentary for CBC-TV, CBC Radio, CBC Newsworld, the Ottawa Journal, the Edmonton Journal, the Toronto Star, Canadian Forum Magazine and Time Canada.

Stephen Harper has moved beyond being the prime minister of Canada. He’s its CEO, making Canada the first democracy to tacitly embrace global corporate governance.

Canada finds itself presiding over the birth of a new Dark Age. The Age of Democracy is over. The Age of Corporate Rule is upon us.

Harper is uniquely qualified to be Canada’s first CEO. His father worked for Imperial Oil (Exxon in global parlance) in Calgary. Harper graduated in economics from the University of Calgary. Its “Calgary School” politicial scientists were recruited largely from the American Right, according to one of their mentors, Allan Kornberg. The objective was to blunt the “leftist statism” of Canadian academia.

Unfortunately for Canadians, this group’s dislike of the so called “left” also extended to open disdain for Canada’s system of parliamentary democracy – a disdain the current prime minister shares in spades. Since taking office – and especially since winning his long-coveted “strong, stable, majority Conservative government” – Harper has thrown parliamentary democracy under the bus.

As Toronto Star columnist Carol Goar wrote Sept. 25: “(Harper’s) rules strike at the heart of responsible government.” His two 400-page plus omnibus budget bills “tax Canadians without allowing their elected representatives a chance to speak for them. They violate a fundamental tenet of democracy: the government acts with the consent of the people. Canadians never gave their assent to Harper’s just-trust-me approach.”

The Harper government has turned parliamentary democracy upside down. The government doesn’t answer to parliament, it requires Parliament to answer to the government. When Parliament was in the position to defeat the government – a situation that has occurred twice since this government took office – the prime minister simply prorogued it, creating two crippling and deadly precedents for Canadian parliamentary democracy.

In December, 2008, the first – and most dangerous — precedent was set when Gov. Gen. Michaëlle Jean granted Harper prorogation to stave off parliamentary defeat. This led the director of the Constitution Unit at University College, London, to write:

“Canada’s Parliament is more dysfunctional than any of the other Westminster Parliaments. No prime minister in any Commonwealth country with a governor general, until Harper, has ever sought prorogation to avoid a vote of confidence. Only in Canada has a government secured the prorogation of Parliament to save itself from political defeat and only in Canada has the governor general been party to it.”

Having won once, Harper prorogued — or more accurately, trampled — Parliament again, this time in 2010, to avoid being found in contempt of parliament over the treatment of Afghan detainees.

Harper’s contempt for Parliament is systemic and reflexive. He bundles budgets into huge omnibus bills, trampling the ancient right and duty of parliamentarians to monitor the government’s management of the public purse. He forces parliamentary committees to operate behind closed doors, presumably to prevent any public washing of dirty government laundry by witnesses or opposition MPs. Opposition MPs who dare reveal what happens behind those closed doors can be found in contempt of Parliament and so muzzle themselves.

These three assaults strike at the core tenets of parliamentary democracy.

But the contempt doesn’t stop there. It is also visible in the truly revolutionary contents of these two massive legislative catch-alls — perhaps the most appalling being the horrific assault on Canada’s spectacular natural environment, particularly its lakes, rivers and wildlife. All — including science and knowledge itself — are to be sacrificed to the government’s single objective: pursuing the extraction and export of tar sands oil.

His fixation with control and secrecy drives his government’s relationship with the provinces, with whom he largely refuses to meet, as well as the negotiation and conclusion of trade treaties, which he signs with abandon, and with virtually no parliamentary oversight, consultation or debate allowed.

In fact, elevating corporate rights over the rights of citizens and their democractic institutions seems to be the Harper government’s core agenda. Its aggressive “free trade” stance has led to agreements with Panama, Jordan, Columbia, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, Switzerland and Honduras. It’s negotiating with the European Union, India and the Trans-Pacific Partnership — not to mention its groundbreaking 31-year trade deal with China, slated to be signed next week with no parliamentary debate, let alone approval. Several of these countries are under authoritarian rule.

Using her one-minute members’ statement in the House last week, Green Party leader Elizabeth May tried to alert Canadians to the dangerous features of the Harperites’ 31-year trade deal with China.

“Mr. Speaker, here’s your 60-second briefing on the Canada-China Trade and Investment Treaty, the most significant treaty of its kind since NAFTA … (I)t confirms that Chinese state-owned enterprises will have the right to charge for damages from decisions in Canada from municipal, provincial, territorial and the federal government. It confirms this treaty will apply for a minimum ’til 2027 and potentially until 2042 and China can complain of anything it feels is arbitrary. It will be a greater benefit for Chinese investors in Canada than to Canadian investors in China. No province has been asked if it approves of this agreement.

“Yesterday, the prime minister asked members of this place to acquaint themselves with the treaty. I have. It threatens our security, our sovereignty and our democracy. And yet this 60 seconds will be the only briefing this house gets. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.”

The rest of the democratic world should pay attention to the wholesale trashing of Canada’s parliamentary democracy because Canada is the canary in the mine of a dystopian New World Order.

The gradual encroachment of global corporate rule began in 1973, when American billionaire David Rockefeller founded the Trilateral Commission, an exclusive, secretive club composed of the corporate, academic and political elites of the U.S., Europe and Japan.

The September 1989 issue of Le Monde Diplomatique, a magazine published by France’s leading newspaper, featured a retrospective on the Trilateral Commission’s 1973 symposium on democracy. Entitled The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies, it warned “an excess of democracy” was creating a governability problem in the western world.

Reacting to the heightened political participation, social protest and citizen engagement of the 1960s, the report’s U.S. author, Samuel P. Huntington, warned of a “democratic distemper” as people demanded more of government while challenging established authority.

“People no longer felt the same compulsion to obey those whom they had previously considered superior to themselves in age, rank, status, expertise, character or talents,” the report continued. “An excess of democracy means a deficit in governability. There are potentially desirable limits to the indefinite extension of political democracy.”

Huntington went further, claiming the effective functioning of democracy requires a measure of apathy and non-participation by some groups. Democracy’s governability was further threatened by the awakening of “previously passive or unorganized groups in the population — blacks, Indians, Chicanos, white ethnic groups, students and women — all of whom became organized and mobilized in new ways to achieve what they considered to be their appropriate share of the action and the rewards.”

Huntington’s solution was to dampen political engagement. “(T)he effective operation of a democratic political system usually requires some measure of apathy and noninvolvement on the part of some individuals and groups.” When too many people participate, there is a “breakdown” of democracy.

What better way to dampen engagement than to tamp down equality and social mobility and assault the core institutions of the democratic state. Canada under the Harper Conservatives is leading the global charge among the First World democracies.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.

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Frances Russell is a Winnipeg-based freelance journalist and author. She is a regular contributor to the Winnipeg Free Press and is the author of two award-winning books. Her career has spanned nearly 50 years and includes time as a reporter and political columnist with the Winnipeg Free Press, the Vancouver Sun, the Globe and Mail and United Press International, in Ottawa. She also provided occasional columns and commentary for CBC-TV, CBC Radio, CBC Newsworld, the Ottawa Journal, the Edmonton Journal, the Toronto Star, Canadian Forum Magazine and Time Canada.